Contagion

“A distraction,” she said. She took a couple of steps towards Jack, a symbolic gesture that seemed to shift the whole balance on the boat. I still can’t trust her for a second, Jack thought. But this was more confusing than ever. Was it a part of Reaper’s play?

“You can leave with him,” Jack said.

“Yeah, get the hell off my boat,” Sparky said.

Fleeter shook her head and came closer to Jack. He readied himself to flip, and at the first sign of her going he would do so. He wouldn’t let her phase out, grasp him, knock him out, put him down. Everyone was depending on him, and that idea had been growing for some time. He was no better than any of them—he believed that deeply, because humility had always been a part of him—but they did rely on him. In these dangerous times, his own deadliness was their protection.

“You’re cannon fodder,” Fleeter said to Jack. “You and all the Irregulars. Cause a distraction, draw fire while we can…while Reaper and the Superiors can escape.”

Jack saw Reaper tense, and then smile again. “Jack could have found that out for himself, I’m sure,” he said. “Asked me a question with one power.” He wiggled his fingers like a manic spider. “Delved inside my mind with another.”

“I chose not to,” Jack said. Fleeter paused, slightly closer to him than Reaper. She was waiting for the violence her revelation might bring, or perhaps some sign of acceptance from Jack. She received neither.

“It doesn’t matter,” Reaper said. He nodded at Fleeter. “You don’t matter. We’ll still be ready when you are. Make your own ineffectual efforts to get out, and we’ll be right behind you.”

“If I thought there was an ounce of decency left in you, I’d ask you to be with us,” Jack said.

Reaper chuckled softly, and the ice flow trapping the boat rumbled and cracked. “But there’s not,” he said. He glanced up at the sun. “Nine, maybe eight hours left. And while we wait for you weaklings to make your move, there are still Choppers left to hunt.” With that he turned and jumped from the boat, and Shade and the ice woman followed.

Jack could have stopped them. For a moment he even saw what might happen—the ice cracking in great convulsions, rearing up, smashing together with Reaper and his other Superiors trapped between the solid slabs, and then flowing quickly along the Thames. Anyone not crushed to death would drown. Anyone not drowned would be slaughtered by the Choppers stationed at the Thames barrier.

He knew he could do it. But the moment when he considered that was over in a blink, and then Fleeter was sitting before him, almost contrite.

“Right,” she said. “Right. Okay. I’ve just pissed off Reaper.”

“I do it all the time,” Jack said.

The others around the boat rose and sat on benches, nursing cuts and bruises and breathing a collective sigh of relief.

“Intense,” Sparky said. “London is just way too intense for me. Give me a little village, country lanes, forests, a pub.”

“Maybe soon,” Lucy-Anne said, and for a while no one said anything else.

Maybe soon, Jack thought. But for the life of him he didn’t know how.

Fleeter sat on her own at the bow of the boat. Jack tended to Breezer—healing his wounds, easing the bruising he’d received across his left shoulder as he’d fallen—and then he moved up close to Fleeter to try and clear the ice. She looked ahead, beneath the bridge, even though he was close behind her. Either something about her had changed radically, or she was a good actress.

Jack leaned over the handrail and dipped both hands into the cold water. The ice was already turning slushy without the ice woman there to tend it, and as Jack heated the water from one of his inner suns, the boat drifted away from the floe’s grasp. Breezer started the engine and reversed the boat, aiming for the gentle arch closer to the north bank.

Jack sat close to Fleeter and looked back at the others. They were sitting close, talking quietly, tending cuts and bruises and trying to move on from the tense confrontation. Rhali more than anyone seemed quite calm, but she had not seen what Reaper could do. And what she had been through was worse than anything he could have dreamed up.

“So,” Jack said.

He heard Fleeter laugh softly, but they sat almost back to back. He knew that sometimes it was easier to speak honestly when you did not have to look someone in the face.

“So,” Fleeter said, “Reaper was telling the truth. I’ve been following you ever since I got back from taking your mother and sister out of London. And though a big part of why I did so was because Reaper asked me, because he likes control and, well, I think somewhere inside he still cares a little…I also followed you for myself.”

Jack wasn’t sure what she meant. She’d flirted with him, but he’d put it down to her seeking a measure of control more than anything else. “For yourself?” he asked.

She laughed again, and this time it sounded more heartfelt. “Don’t flatter yourself. Well, maybe you’re a cutie, Jack. Maybe you are. But I know you’ve got a good heart, and you’ve seen what I can do, and what I’ve done. I know you’re still beating yourself up about those Choppers you had to kill. I must be a monster to you.”

“No,” Jack began, but Fleeter turned around and grabbed his shoulder, hard enough to hurt. She pulled him around to face her. She was serious. Even behind the omnipresent smile, she was as serious as he’d ever seen her.

“I saw outside,” she said. Her eyes went wide like a kid seeing Disneyworld for the first time. “When I took them through there was a sense of…release. Even though there were still houses and streets where we came out, it all felt so different. It felt like another world because it was another world, and I knew that. And for the first time in a long while I allowed myself to…to remember.”

She trailed off, but Jack did not prompt her. This was a story she had to tell in her own time.

“Almost as soon as Doomsday happened, my life became a dream,” she said. “I’ve always been a daydreamer. When I was a kid my mother said I’d sit in the garden with my dolls and plastic animals and…just… disappear. Into my own world. She told me she used to worry about it, but then she started seeing it as something wonderful. I’d sit there for hours just playing, totally immersed in my imagination, and those dolls and animals would come to life. She timed me once, and I was there for almost three hours without looking up. And when I did look up she said I looked blank, blinking, wondering where I was. Then I smiled at her…at my mummy… and…”

There were tears in her eyes, but she seemed unaware.

“Guiding your mother and Emily out of London reminded me of the world I’ve forgotten,” she said. “Reaper took me in and made me what I am.” She frowned, shook her head. “No. He showed me the way. What I became was all my fault. But under his wing I forgot my mother and my brother, and London became my whole world. Coming back in yesterday, leaving your mother and sister out there, free, in the world I’ve forgotten…that made me realise I’ve been living in a dream. For the last two years, with Reaper and the others, doing what I do and seeing what I’ve seen. All of it has been a dream.”

“And you’re waking up,” Jack said.

“No, Jack,” Fleeter said. “But at least I know I’m dreaming. Helping you get back to your family, helping you all…perhaps that’ll give me a chance to wake.”

Jack could have asked Breezer to use his own talent to probe inward, discover Fleeter’s truths. And Jack thought he could have also done so himself. But he thought this was something that demanded trust.

“Thank you,” he said, and he meant it.

“Don’t thank me yet.” She shrugged. “I know he’s your father, and there’s more of that left in him than you give him credit for. But Reaper’s a mean bastard. No saying what he’ll do next.”

“Yeah, I know,” Jack said. “Not as if we haven’t already got stuff keeping us on our toes.”

She laughed again, and Jack prodded her shoulder, a friendly nudge. He might have hit Sparky in the same way. Something told him that Fleeter was not the hugging kind.